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Overview

Wendy Troxel is a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. Troxel's research focuses on understanding the links between close relationships and sleep, and how this relationship may influence couples' health and functioning. She has published two seminal review papers on this topic and is recognized as the leading authority on sleep within the context of couples.

Troxel has received several awards and honors for her research from national and international scientific societies, and her work has been published in top-tier medical and psychological journals. Her research is funded by the National Heart Lung Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. She is also an active clinical psychologist with a focus on behavioral (non-pharmacologic) treatments for sleep disorders. She was the founding director of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine accredited training program in behavioral sleep medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, and remains on its advisory board. She has leadership roles in several professional sleep societies, including the Society of Behavioral Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

Troxel's research has received widespread media attention, including print and television interviews on CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN, and she has a regular blog on sleep on Huffington Post. Troxel received her Ph.D. in clinical/health psychology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Commentary

The recent death of a South Carolina teen, reportedly of a caffeine overdose, is both tragic and avoidable. It should be a wake-up call for all Americans. Getting sufficient sleep should be a top health priority.

Sleep-deprived teens are more likely to be involved in motor vehicle crashes and to abuse drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes — all of which are public health concerns. But delaying school start times remains challenging for many districts.

Insufficient sleep is linked to lower productivity, which results in working days being lost each year. With a few simple measures, employers could help improve the health and well-being of staff, improve their bottom lines, and contribute to a growing economy.

Sleep and sleep loss are often considered to be among the most intimate of personal behaviors, but sleep matters to all aspects of society, from an individual's health to the success of the global economy.

The fire and resulting closure of the Liberty Bridge is forcing some Pittsburgh high school students to sacrifice sleep to meet a new 7:11 a.m. start time. Sleep loss has consequences for adolescents' minds, bodies, behavior, and for public safety.

New guidelines from the American College of Physicians favor behavioral therapy over meds as the first-line treatment for insomnia. However, the ACP's recommendation will not in itself raise the level of access to optimal care for insomnia patients.

An alarming number of American city dwellers face sleepless nights, followed inevitably by days of productivity-sapping fatigue and, ultimately, the possibility of more serious health consequences. There are some things they can do to better their chances of falling and staying asleep.

More than 60 percent of service members don't get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep per night. About a third get by on five hours or less. The military, and society at large, needs to recognize the importance of sleep as a crucial link to physical and mental well-being.

Halloween and Daylight Saving Time can wreak havoc on children's sleep schedules. But because parents know what's coming, they can prepare by monitoring what kids consume, maintaining calm, consistent schedules, and slowly shifting bedtime over a few days to accommodate the new time settings.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults report that they regularly sleep with a partner. Yet, through 60 years or so of sleep research, scientists have tended to view sleep as an individual behavior, largely ignoring the potential impact of bedmates.

As seductive as a warm bed may be on a cold morning, staying in bed too long can lead to disrupted sleep and a sleep-sapping case of the winter blues. These are the times when we need to resist the urge to hibernate and force ourselves to get going.

Though “microsleep,” commonly referred to as “highway hypnosis,” may enter the public discourse most often when it's cited as the possible cause of a disaster like the Metro-North train wreck, it is responsible for fatal accidents on American highways every day.

The holiday season is a time when people try to do too much. And that often leads to stress and worry, which can be the enemies of a good night's sleep. Here are a few tricks to help manage the episodic bouts of insomnia that are common during the holidays.

Atop the new mayor's agenda should be improving the health and well-being of Pittsburgh residents. With an unassailable electoral mandate in hand, Mr. Peduto is positioned to take bold steps. And the best way to do that is by applying scientific and medical evidence to shape an integrated, citywide, health-policy framework.

Associations between the relationship behaviors of young veterans and their spouses and measured sleep quality suggest that interventions to decrease hostility could improve both marital and physical health.

Improving individual sleeping habits has huge implications. Small increases in sleep can make big differences to national economies. RAND Europe's novel study quantifies the economic and social costs of insufficient sleep among the global workforce.

Perceptions of a neighborhood's characteristics, such as safety, were associated with sleep quality among low-income African American adults, but objective characteristics, such as crime rates, were not.

This report examines the economic burden of insufficient sleep across five different OECD countries. The findings of this study suggest that insufficient sleep can result in large economic costs in terms of lost GDP and lower labour productivity.

Deployment can be a significant source of stress for military families. Understanding how families prepare in the face of such stress, and which families are less likely to prepare, is a priority of the Department of Defense.

This overview of the findings from the RAND Deployment Life Study describes the effects of deployment on marital relationships, family environment, psychological and behavioral health, child well-being, and military integration.

In 2009, RAND launched the Deployment Life Study to study military family readiness. This report presents analyses on marital relationships, family environment, psychological and behavioral health, child well-being, and military integration.

We report here on the first gathering of the National Institutes of Health Basic Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Opportunity Network grant recipients in the separate but interrelated topics of psychosocial stress and sleep.

Summarizes findings from a review of the literature on whole-body vibration (WBV) and fatigue, in addition to looking at study designs and methodology for providing more rigorous investigations of the impact of WBV on fatigue and driver safety.

The current study examines the association between self-reported measures of trouble sleeping, total sleep time (TST), and bedtimes and odds of past month alcohol and marijuana (AM) use in a racially/ethnically diverse sample of adolescents.

Sleep problems can have consequences for servicemembers' health and for force readiness and resiliency. This first-ever comprehensive review of sleep-related policies and programs led to recommendations for improving sleep across the force.

Sleep problems can have long-term consequences for servicemembers' health and for force readiness and resiliency. This first-ever comprehensive review of sleep-related policies and programs led to recommendations for improving sleep across the force.

Sleep problems can have consequences for servicemembers' health and for force readiness and resiliency. Findings from a large-scale survey of servicemembers offer guidance for policies and programs to identify, treat, and prevent sleep problems.

Sleep health research, development of sleep health policies, and evaluation of sleep health programs should focus on promoting sleep health throughout the deployment cycle and in training environments to aid in prevention efforts.

In this review, a brief introduction to the issue of health disparities is provided, population-level disparities and inequalities in sleep are described, and the social-ecological model of sleep and health is presented.

US-born Hispanic/Latina, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants were more likely to report sleep complaints than their first-generation ethnic counterparts, a finding largely explained by language acculturation and unmeasured factors associated with language acculturation.

The authors used path analysis to examine the direct relationship between attachment security and maternal reports of sleep problems during toddlerhood and links with subsequent teacher-reported emotional and behavioral problems.

Insomnia is a highly prevalent and debilitating sleep disorder. It is well documented that psychological treatments, including cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI), are efficacious treatments, with effect sizes of comparable magnitude to that of pharmacologic treatment.

Teenagers' ability to transition safely into adulthood depends, in large part, on how schools support their healthy brain, body, and socio-emotional development. A compelling body of research has shown that sleep plays a critical role in all of these areas.

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